Get Internal Buy-in for Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Picture the scene; you’re a digital marketing manager and you’ve hired a digital marketing agency to work with you to implement a digital strategy in order to grow your online business. Yet despite this, you’re struggling to get buy-in from the key stakeholders within your business.

I’m sure this is a familiar scenario for many marketing managers; your agency is doing great work for you and the results are good, but despite this you still have difficulty convincing the company at large of your strategy and why they should invest time and money into your marketing efforts.

If you’re facing similar obstacles, then I have 3 valuable tips on how you can change the perception of digital within your business, get your company to understand why your online strategy is important and what it means to them:

1. Don’t keep your agency to yourself

I appreciate that sales teams, managers and directors are all extremely busy people, but if you can grab a couple of hours in their diaries, your agency will be able to make it a worthwhile use of their time.

If possible, try and round-up the key stakeholders in your business and put your agency in front of them. I recently had an excellent day with one of my clients when I was given the opportunity to present to their senior management team and explain what the activity we’d been undertaking meant to them, and how important it was to their bottom line.

The presentation involved a top-level overview of what digital marketing is and how the work we’ve been undertaking has impacted the number of leads we have generated for them. Once you can have your agency clearly demonstrate strategy, tactics and results to your stakeholders, you are able to achieve much more engagement from them and a greater understanding of how they can play a part in the creation of content, social activity and how their involvement can ultimately help growth.

2. Showcase your results

As a marketing manager, you will usually have to provide your senior management team with weekly/monthly results and reports on activity, but sometimes these reports can be quite in-depth and primarily for the marketing manager to digest.

To get the ‘wow factor’ from the excellent results your agency has achieved, why not get the agency to present the growth figures in an easily digestible slide deck?

I began my recent presentation with some quick-fire results, showing phenomenal growth in traffic, and more importantly leads into the business.

The results themselves are impressive, and explaining clearly and concisely to non-marketers how these results were achieved proved the value of their investment in digital marketing.

Outlining to them how they can contribute to the digital strategy by getting involved with blogging, site content and social activity is far easier once they can see how this impacts the results that matter most to them – profit!

3. Excite them about the future

Your digital agency should not only be able to present historic results and show how these were achieved, but also be innovative and creative about the future of digital.

It’ll help your cause no end if your agency can show that they are well on top of future developments in SEO, PPC and social media marketing. Giving the stakeholders a clear picture of how future developments, in particular the growth of mobile, will impact their business should inspire them to buy into your marketing strategy and give them confidence to invest both time and money into digital marketing going forward.

I’d really like to thank the team from Total Landlord Insurance for taking the time out of their busy schedule to let me help them understand digital and what it means to them. I’ll leave you with some feedback from Natalie Crane, Marketing and Communications Manager:

“Russ provided a lively and interesting presentation, which gave our sales team a real insight into the intricacies of digital marketing and the progress we have made toward achieving our business objectives using digital tactics.

Our staff members found it helpful and enlightening. It gave them an opportunity to get the answers to some of their burning questions and gave them a greater appreciation of the efforts of the Marketing department.

It has certainly assisted in the process of gaining buy-in from internal staff members for any new digital ideas and concepts we introduce.”